With a staggering 1.4 billion monthly active users spending an average of 33.1 minutes daily on the app, Instagram's potential influence on consumers is not just significant, it's a game-changer. This makes it a platform businesses can't afford to ignore, and the quality of your creative assets is key to unlocking its full potential.
Given that over 200 million businesses worldwide are already active on Instagram, finding ways to stand out on this bustling network is crucial. To successfully achieve this, you need two things: ad campaigns with smart audience targeting and budgeting strategies and high-quality creative assets to fuel said campaign.
It's not just about having creative assets for your Instagram ads. It's about having the right visuals and videos. Assets that engage, attract attention, and resonate with your audience are the foundation of any successful Instagram ad campaign.
So, with that said, here's our guide to finding the best assets for your next Instagram ad campaign. The good news is there's a wealth of sources available. Let's take a look.
Stock images
Stock images are royalty-free, quick to access, and budget-friendly because you don't have to fork out for a photo shoot yourself. This makes them a practical choice for businesses looking to create high-quality ads on a budget.
Pexels is one such stock image marketplace that focuses on empowering creators and designers to access high-quality visuals for their work. The platform is straightforward to navigate and offers thousands of royalty-free, high-resolution pictures and videos. You can easily find what you're looking for using the Explore tab on the homepage or typing a topic in the search bar.
For example, when searching Pexels for "travel" themed images and videos, we found over 168K of the former and 32k of the latter.
You can filter videos and images further by orientation including Horizontal, Vertical and Square. You can also filter by size, and via a series of auto-suggested travel-related keywords, such as Adventure, Summer or Airport.
Ad templates
Ad templates are a great time saver and can be repurposed time and again for future ads.
We recommend Adobe Express for anyone on a budget looking for ad templates from a reputable source. Adobe Express is free to use, and no credit card details are required. Plus, there are tons of Instagram story and post templates to choose from.
All templates are customisable, so you can add your logo, amend the text, and use your brand's colour palette and typography. You can also resize these ads for use across all your social channels.
Hire talented creators
Alternatively, why not hire a talented creator to generate Instagram ad assets for you? One of the easiest ways to find skilled creators for this kind of content is through the Popular Pays platform from Lightricks, which unlocks access to 100,000+ expert creatives.
Start by creating your brief and sorting through the available creators to identify those most relevant to your niche. Once you've connected with the right creators, you can work with them on every step of your Instagram ad campaign - from the initial concepts to the final ad edits.
Popular Pays also handles all the admin (contracts, legal, payments, etc.), so you can focus entirely on collaborating to produce great-looking Instagram ads.
Native generative AI ads
Meta's image generation tool, Meta.ai, can create ad images with text overlays and customisable backgrounds.
This is Meta's most advanced AI tool to date. It's built on Meta Llama 3, which the company's website describes as "an intelligent assistant that is capable of complex reasoning, following instructions, visualising ideas, and solving nuanced problems".
Also, Meta began to roll out Meta Imagine on 18 April 2024. Here, an image appears as you start typing in the Meta AI web experience. The more you type, the more the image will adapt to better relate to your text. The pictures are sharp, high quality, and can include text.
In addition, if you find an image you like elsewhere, you can ask Meta AI to animate it, recreate it in a different style, or turn it into a GIF.
Ad design automation platforms
Lastly, you can expedite content creation for your Instagram ads with an ad design automation platform.
We've chosen Creatopy as our preferred end-to-end automation tool for ad design. It streamlines creative tasks and offers various Instagram-friendly design assets, including custom animations, fonts, clipart, and more. All of these assets are accessible via Creatopy's intuitive drag-and-drop design platform.
Thanks to its Zapier integration, you can easily build custom workflows to handle repetitive design tasks at scale, on an automated basis. For example, you can set triggers and actions in Zapier that prompt Creatopy to create visuals based on product URLs, microcopy, or whatever else you drop into a Google spreadsheet, and then post these assets directly to your Instagram dashboard.
The best assets for your next campaign
All marketers hope their Instagram ads will stand out from the crowd and persuade their target audience to engage with their campaigns.
Sourcing high-quality creative assets for your ads goes a long way toward helping you achieve that. Explore the above tools to help you speed up the process of finding and creating compelling assets for your Instagram ads that will hopefully resonate with your audience.
Whether you enlist AI or talented creators to help concoct your Instagram ads or have the time to do it yourself, a mix of the above tools will help you create consistent and attractive ads that align with your brand and convert.
Copyright 2024. Featured post made possible by Jeff Broth.